The disclosure addresses the topic of improving the High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) and Video. High Dynamic Range (HDR) is an important method to improve the quality of current and future image and video capturing devices, such as smart-phones, cameras etc. HDRI is typically realized by capturing differently exposed images and merging them into an HDR image. The more different exposure settings and corresponding images are captured, the better is the quality of the final HDR image.
In the context of the present disclosure, the exposure time is the time interval which controls the amount of light the capturing device is exposed to during the capturing of an image or video frame. The larger the brighter the image/frame. A two-dimensional (2D) image or picture is a normal 2D image acquired with one camera, wherein the image may be defined by means of e.g. RGB or chrominance-luminance values. A texture is an area within an image which depicts content having significant variation in the color intensities. An over-exposed image area is an image area with too much light exposure, such that the majority of the area becomes white. An under-exposed image area is an image area with too less light exposure, such that the majority of the area becomes black.
It is known in the state of the art that HDR processing is based on a predefined set of different exposure times, i.e. an HDR image is obtained by merging a plurality of images captured at predefined set of exposure times. However, since the set of predefined exposure times is predefined, texture information may be lost in the generated HDR image.
For certain applications, the set of different exposure times to be used is limited. For example, the set of images captured at different exposure times is limited by time constraints. This holds for image HDR but especially for video HDR applications.